Hymn of the Earth

Rev. Paul Sprecher

Second Parish in Hingham, www.secondparish.org

April 3, 2011

 

Reading: Psalm 8, from Stephen Mitchell, A Book of Psalms:  Selected and Adapted from the Hebrew, New York:  HarperCollins Publishers, 1993, p. 5.

 

Unnamable God, how measureless is your power on all the earth
     and how radiant in the sky!

When I look up at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

     the moon and the multitude of stars,

what is man, that you love him,

and woman, that you gladden her heart?

Yet you made us almost like the angels and crowned us with understanding.

You put us in charge of all creatures

   and placed your whole earth in our hands

all animals, tame and wild,

all forests, fields, and deserts,

even the pure air of the sky, even the depths of the ocean.

Unnamable God, how terrible is our power on all the earth!

Reading:   Mark Hertsgaard, Hot:  Living Through the next Fifty Years on Earth

 

[In 2005, I interviewed Sir David King, chief science advisor the the British government.  In effect, he] told me that climate change had already arrived, a hundred years ahead of schedule. If he was right, the debate over global warming was forever altered. If climate change had indeed already begun, the inertia of the climate system ensured that the planet was locked in to at least twenty-five more years of rising temperatures no matter what—no matter how many solar panels people bought, no matter how soon the United States and China might limit their emissions, no matter what treaties the world's governments might one day agree upon. And as temperatures continued rising, this additional global warming would drive additional climate change: harsher hurricanes, deadlier wildfires, more epidemics….

Humans had played a decisive role [in the delay]. Our collective failure to take action against global warming had been a conscious decision, a result of countless official debates where the case for reducing greenhouse gas emissions was exhaustively considered and deliberately rejected. Voices of caution had repeatedly been overpowered within the halls of government, in the media, and in the business world. Bankrolled by [the Global Climate Coalition of] the energy and auto companies that profited from carbon emissions, opponents of taking action had confused the public, politicians, and the media with false or misleading information while also pressuring governments not to act….  It turned out that the coalition's own scientific advisers had informed its leadership in 1995—two years before the carbon lobby led the fight against the Kyoto Protocol—that the science behind man-made global warming was "well established and cannot be denied." The coalition's board of directors responded by ordering their scientists' judgment removed from the coalition's public statements….

Now, in October 2005, it was becoming clear that scientists had actually underestimated the danger. Humanity had lost the bet. Climate change had arrived a century sooner than expected, and future generations were no longer the only victims. My daughter and her peers around the world were now at grave risk as well.

Sermon

All indications to the contrary notwithstanding, we have officially arrived at the spring of the year.  It’s a good time to remember Mary Oliver’s “The Poet Comments on Yet Another Approaching Spring:”

Don't flowers put on their

prettiness each spring and

go to it with

everything they've got? Who

 

would criticize the bed of

yellow tulips or the blue

hyacinths?
So put a

 

bracelet on your

ankle with a

         bell on it and make a
             little music for

 

the earth beneath your foot, or
wear a hat with hot-colored
   ribbons for the

pleasure of the

 

leaves and the clouds, or at least
a ring with a gleaming

         stone for your finger; yesterday
               I watched a mother choose

 

exquisite ear-ornaments for someone
beloved, in the spring

of her life; they were

             for her for sure, but also it seemed

 

a promise, a love-message, a commitment
to all girls, and boys too, so

beautiful and hopeful in this hard world
and young.[i]

 

Earth was given as a garden, as our opening hymn reminded us.  Mythic memory of a golden age far in the past is common in many cultures around the world, but the particular myth our Judeo-Christian tradition holds out to us is the Garden of Eden – a Garden of Delight, in the Hebrew.  A myth such as this does not point to a set of provable facts; rather, is a powerful metaphor for of expressing a reality that transcends particular facts and tells us something precious about ourselves and about our place on this earth.  In the story told in the second chapter of Genesis, God is a gardener:

Gen 2:⁸ And the LORD God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. ⁹ Out of the ground the LORD God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil….  ¹⁵ The LORD God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it. (NRSV)

The story in the garden continues with the creation of Eve, a partner for Adam, and then it turns dark.  Maybe that part of the tale tells us something about what sometimes happens after people get married, but that’s a story for another day.  The end of the myth of the garden tells us that humans were cast out and forced to live in the world as we know it, a world of toil and sorrow, though also, in its own way, a world of delight, of spring and flowers and vast flowing stars in the sky.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the greatest of our Transcendentalist forebears, celebrates the redeeming delight we may find in this wondrous world in his essay “Nature:”

The lover of nature is he whose inward and outward senses are still truly adjusted to each other; who has retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood. His intercourse with heaven and earth, becomes part of his daily food. In the presence of nature, a wild delight runs through the man, in spite of real sorrows....[ii]

What actually got the humans thrown out of the garden was a kind of hubris, a desire for more than the delights of what they were given, a thirst for knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil.  The story of the garden is often read as a cautionary tale about innocence, disobedience, and the origin of that inner voice we call our conscience; but I think it is more than that.  The myth of Pandora in the Greek tradition is another evocation of that insatiable desire to know more, to penetrate secrets: Pandora was unable to resist opening the box which, unbeknownst to her, contained all of the evils of the world, leaving only hope.  The knowledge of good and evil means more than what our conscience tells is us right and what is wrong; it also means the power to do good and to do evil, the power to create but also the power to destroy. 

Robert Oppenheimer – father of the atomic bond – was struck by the reality of the awesome and awful power humanity had gained by splitting the atom at the first test of the bomb in New Mexico, in the Jornada del Muerto (Journey of Death) desert.  He was reminded of another great myth of the gods, this from the Hindu tradition, in the Bhagavad Gita:  “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”  Now we know how terrible is the knowledge first wrested from nature by the urgent need to ensure that Hitler didn’t unleash that genie from the bottle before the allies in World War II did so. But once knowledge is loosed on the earth like the evils from Pandora’s box, it cannot simply be forgotten.  Today we experience the dread that this wonderful and terrible knowledge of the fundamental forces of nature might be deployed by terrorists or by the frightening regime in Iran, whose future possession of a bomb might lead to an apocalyptic confrontation in the Middle East.  At the Fukushima power plant in Japan we are witnessing the catastrophic destruction resulting from our human hubris in believing we can harness the terrible power of the atom to generate energy for our use.

Henry David Thoreau, another of our Transcendentalist heroes, muses on the loss of the garden:

[M]ost men, it seems to me, do not care for Nature and would sell their share in all her beauty, as long as they may live, for a stated sum—many for a glass of rum. Thank God, men cannot as yet fly, and lay waste to the sky as well as the earth! We are safe on that side for the present. It is for the very reason that some do not care for those things that we need to continue to protect all from the vandalism of the few.[iii]

Of course, we have conquered the air as well and are no longer able to protect the sky itself from being laid waste.  Gary Kowalski, longtime minister of our Unitarian Universalist congregation in Burlington, Vermont, suggests that the myth of the garden reflects a cautionary tale from the Ancient Near East:

The Fertile Crescent, which Genesis identifies as the location of the original Garden of Eden, really was a paradise at one time, or at least amazingly lush….

Mesopotamia (the country currently called Iraq) became the breadbasket of the Middle East. The agricultural surplus was made possible by the annual flooding of the rivers and by an extensive system of canals, dikes, and levees, that trapped the waters during the spring run off and then delivered them to the parched land when and where moisture was needed.

But disaster was in the making. Deforested hills brought increasing silt into the flood plains, slowly raising the water table and bringing more brine to the surface of the ground, where high temperatures and rapid evaporation left a thick layer of salt. The only solution was to leave the land fallow and un-irrigated, to let water tables fall. But this was politically and strategically impossible. As the seat of world power, Sumer depended on its harvests to feed its growing armies and expanding population….

But by 2000 BCE there were alarming reports in Sumer of "the earth turned white," distinct references to the increasing salinization of the soil. And within two centuries, the Sumerian Empire had expired. Paradise had vanished. We were expelled from the cradle of civilization, not by God but rather by our own hand, and not for partaking of forbidden fruit; but for pushing nature past its allowable limits. No cherubim with flaming swords were placed on watch to prevent our re-entering the Garden, for none were needed. The land had become a barren desert, incapable of supporting life, and it remains desolate to this day.[iv]

We are in some ways replaying that tragic ancient story today.  As the human population of the earth grows year by year and as standards of living rise around the world, the demand for limited resources also grows.  The need for oil and natural gas drives us to increasingly risky efforts at extraction such as the two-mile-deep well drilled by BP in the Gulf of Mexico which despoiled the garden of the sea; or the fracking required to extract natural gas which potentially threatens our water supplies.  The demand for increasing amounts of food is driving prices higher and is one of the causes of the revolutions sweeping North Africa.  There is increasing competition for all of the necessities of our advanced civilization.

One of the most urgent challenges we face is the fact that the carbon dioxide emitted by our industrial processes is increasingly leading to a warming of the planet as a whole, one of whose effects is increased moisture in the air.  This results in catastrophic floods in some places, droughts in others; increased snow in parts of the country that normally don’t get snow or that get very little; and receding glaciers and summer ice in the Arctic Ocean.  Some of the results of this warming of the earth seem paradoxical – hence the appropriateness of the term “global weirding.” One of the reasons some deny that global warming is really occurring is that the changes that are happening are in places remote from us.  For example, temperatures in the Arctic are rising much faster than in the temperate climates, and the deserts that are growing are not in our part of the world.  One of the grand ironies of the changes we humans are causing on the earth, our garden, is the fact that the poor of the earth, those who have contributed least to the problem, are also those who will suffer most.  As the warming proceeds, populated islands and coastal plains will be submerged with the rise of the ocean; arable farmland will be lost to some countries even as more temperate climates gain farmland; pure water will become harder to come by as glacial melting changes centuries-old patterns of supply.

There are reasons that powerful voices are raised to deny that these changes are really already happening.  Some are deeply invested in the production of oil, gas, coal and all the other factors contributing to the increase of carbon dioxide; they are pursuing short-term gain, both political and economic, at the expense of the long-term health of the earth.  Some believe so strongly in individualism –the right of each of us to do as they please as long as they don’t directly harm anyone else –that the thought of collective action on a worldwide scale as required by this crisis is anathema to them.  And then of course we are all busy, all caught up in the tasks of living more immediate to our daily lives.  All of these factors and more make it hard for the humans to focus on the need to keep this garden that has been given to us and to hand it on to the many generations that will come after us.  Our own children will be living with the consequences of our choices right now, consequences that will be more or less dire depending on what we as humans choose to do.

Difficult changes come about when people find themselves impelled by commitments to principles and values that call on them to care for others and for the whole of creation – embodied among other places in religious faith.  Our own seventh principle expresses this commitment in these words:  “Respect for the interdependent web of all existence of which we are a part.”  Our second principle calls for “Justice, equity and compassion in human relations,” a call that draws our attention to those who will suffer much more than we from climate change.

There is much we can do.  Some of it is in the way we choose to live our lives; becoming aware of our own contributions to the problem, our own carbon footprint as families.  One of my colleagues chose not to travel to California to a ministerial conference I attended in February because he wants to do whatever he can to reduce his own carbon footprint.  We need to teach our children and learn from our children, who are sometimes more sensitized to these challenges than we are.  But there is more to be done, because even if every person and every family reduced their own contribution to this looming catastrophe to zero, their efforts would be far overshadowed by all of the other contributors outside of our own households.  So we must speak out against those who deny the evidence that global warming is not just something that will happen after we ourselves are gone from this earth, but that is happening before our very eyes.  As free citizens with voices and votes, we need to focus real political will on facing and reversing our human desecration of the garden we have inherited.  We need to insist that those who contribute to the problem bear all of the real costs they are imposing rather than being able to treat side effects of industrial processes as mere externalities to be borne by the world as a whole. 

A popular song from the Sixties by Joni Mitchell encapsulates this vision: “We are stardust, we are golden, We are caught in the devil's bargain, And we got to get ourselves back to the garden.”

Our earth is a garden.  The poet urges us to look well to the flowers, who “put on their prettiness each spring and go to it with everything they’ve god.”  The psalmist reminds us that:

You put us in charge of all creatures

   and placed your whole earth in our hands

all animals, tame and wild,

all forests, fields, and deserts,

even the pure air of the sky, even the depths of the ocean.[v]

Our faith impels us to pay attention, to love the earth and all that is within it, and to do good, not evil, all our days.

So may it be, and Amen.

                                                                    www.secondparish.org